The Google account sign-in process was updated from OAuth 1.0 to OAuth 2.0, given the deprecation of Oauth 1.0. Users of all previous versions of Earth will not be able to sign-in with their Google accounts after May 30th, 2015.

The “Enable Controller” option in user preferences is now turned off by default. This prevents red directional arrows from displaying as a result of uncalibrated joysticks and other controllers being connected to Earth at startup.

For enhanced security, “Use HTTPS for Google connections” is now toggled on by default.

We updated the LEAP API to version 1.0.8 and fixed a crash affecting a portion of users running Earth on Windows XP. If you want to use a LEAP device with Google Earth, ensure you are running LEAP driver version 1.0.8 + from the LEAP Motion website.

The "Enable Controller" option is now default on. If you have an uncalibrated external controller (such as a gaming joystick) connected to your computer, this could result in the Earth spinning with arrows displaying to signify movement. As a workaround, we suggest the following:

Turning off "Enable Controller" in the "Navigation" tab of Options/Preferences

On Macintosh OS, the Google Earth Plugin will not install in Firefox while Firefox is running. As a workaround, install the Plugin when Firefox is closed. Note that this bug does not affect updating the Plugin, only the first installation.

Audio recorded in tours does not play across platforms. As a workaround, record a tour on the OS that you intend to use while playing the tour.

Tours stop recording when there is no 3D View movement during recording.

For users running Intel 965 Express Chipsets on Windows XP and Windows Vista, Earth will appear pixelated when run in OpenGL mode. As a workaround, run Earth in DirectX mode.

[Pro] Print style options are broken when Atmosphere is off. To enable these options, ensure that Atmosphere is on.

[Pro] A Viewshed warning dialog appears for placemarks at ≤2m and a high tilt.

[Pro] After computing a Viewshed Earth areas outside the Viewshed zone suffer corruption. Exiting the Viewshed will correct the display of these areas.

Placemark and linestring quality no longer diminishes in the Plugin with browser refresh.

Known issues

Water surfaces around coastlines will flicker then resolve upon zoom.

[Pro/Enterprise] Rendering of movies, especially movies that show 3D imagery at a tilt, is very slow. As a workaround, we recommend using Google Earth 6.2.2.6613 for movies that require such a perspective.

Support for 3D imagery data: 3D data provides a comprehensive representation of metropolitan environments around the world. 3D imagery is currently available in the these areas.

Tour Guide mechanism in the client: The new tour guide allows you to explore interesting places around the world, even if you don’t know to search for them. As you move, thumbnails of pre-created tours and points of interest will dynamically update with interesting locations in your current view. Read more.

Support for terrain data accessed via Google Maps Engine

Zooming in now tilts at a higher elevation in order to showcase 3D imagery

Fixed an issue where ground overlays without the "icon" tag did not render rectangles using the fill color. KML ground overlays where images fail to load will now draw rectangles using a default or user-specified fill color.

Added the ability to create balloon HTML for locally saved images using the “Add image” button.

Google Earth Pro has improved support for printing from the client. Changes include a legend with a North indicator and scale, controls for print/paper size, and improved performance.

Google Earth Pro has improved the experience of making movies by simplifying the user interface and improving performance in certain configurations.

Importing data files in Google Earth Pro is now easier with the ability to edit shared balloon style for folders and to increase the import categorization limit from 8 to 64.

Google Earth Pro now allows you to view an elevation profile while measuring.

In Google Earth (Consumer and Pro version):

Improved the robustness of network access by providing better support for Proxy and SSL certs. This will fix issues users have experienced of not being able to see balloon content or embedded browser content.

Improved the resolution seen in elevation profiles for lines and tracks.

Added the ability to sort “My Places,” and improved the user interface to be able find points across my places.

There were several improvements to Street View in Google Earth. We added the ability to zoom into a Street View photo by using a zoom slider. Street View in Earth feels more immersive now due to wider field of view. It is now faster and smoother to use. We made several small tweaks to the user interface including adding a way to navigate floors when you are indoors and there are multiple floors available in Street View.

Fixed bugs related to missing road labels in cases where roads were curvy or zoomed into.

To conform more closely with the OGC KML 2.2 standard, we've made the parsing of the <coordinates> tag more strict in version 6.1. Spaces must only be used to separate the (longitude,latitude,altitude) triplets which specify the coordinates of a single point. It is invalid to add spaces between individual coordinates. We understand that previous versions of the client were more lenient, so if your KML files contain spaces beween coordinates in coordinate triplets, an easy workaround is to remove all whitespace located immediately before or after commas inside a <coordinates> tag.

Several performance improvements that would allow smoother experience in specific computer configurations.

Fixed 'Restrict to View' functionality during a shapefile import in Google Earth Pro.

Fixed an issue where Google Earth would sometimes save incorrect ordering of elements in KML.

Added field of view recording to tours and ability to play back those changes.

Fixed an issue where the icon heading did not work in Google Earth API.

Changes to reduce occurrences of missing desktop icon and shortcut menu items on an update.

Sped up overlay polygon rendering in OpenGL mode.

Fixed loading of kmz files when the first file at the root level was image file.

Upgraded GDAL support to 1.7.0 and fixed issues with importing .tab files in Google Earth Pro.

Fixed the discrepancy caused in measurements due to multiple radii of Earth used inside Google Earth.

Fixed an issue where placemarks created with UTM coordinates did not move when edited.

Fixed a problem where we were over fetching certain kml layer data and running into issuing of using large amounts of memory and slowness during zooming in.

Fixed an issue of ruler tool disappearing. In 6.0 beta, when measuring using the path tool, if you break to add a place-mark then you go back to the path and click "save" the path and ruler tool disappears all together.

New features in Google Earth 6

Integrated Street View: In Google Earth 6, the Street View experience is now fully integrated. You can enter Street View either by dropping pegman in navigation controls or by zooming in all the way to ground level on places that have Street View.

3D Trees:Google Earth now has trees. You can enable trees by turning on the check-box next to the Trees layer under the 3D buildings layer folder. You can see trees in several places, and we will add trees to more places over time.

Easy to use historical imagery:When you fly to an area where historical imagery is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If you click on this date, you’ll instantly be taken back in time to view imagery from that time period.

Ground-level navigation: In Google Earth 6, in addition to flying around features, you can now walk on the ground to explore either 3D buildings and trees or Street View imagery.

3D Measurements in Google Earth Pro:In addition to measuring distances and areas on the ground, you can now measure heights and widths of 3D building and distances from buildings to the ground.

Other changes in Google Earth 6

Tour Recorder Improvements:With Google Earth 6, the tour recording feature has been improved in several ways. The tour recorder now incorporates the activation of Sunlight, Street View, and Historical Imagery modes into the recorded tour. Additionally, the quality of the recording has been significantly improved, including better motion fidelity and better synchronization with sound recording.

Earth on PowerPC Mac:We are discontinuing support for Google Earth builds that work on PowerPC Macs. Users of PowerPC macs can still use the Google Earth 5.2 version.

Earth on OS X 10.4:We are discontinuing support for Google Earth builds that work on 10.4 version of Mac OS X. Users of this version of Mac OS X can still use Google Earth 5.2 version.

Earth on Windows 2000:We are discontinuing support for Google Earth builds that work on Windows 2000. Users of Windows 2000 can still use the Google Earth 5.2 version.

Linux Builds:Google Earth Linux binaries are now based on the Linux Standard Base. This improves the compatibility of Google Earth on different Linux distributions, but requires users to have Linux Standard Base installed on their system. If your Linux system does not have LSB, please install it using apt, yum, smart or up2date. As a side effect of moving to LSB, joysticks are currently unsupported.

Track and Multitrack in Google Earth: A track allows you to create one visible object in Google Earth (either a Point icon or a Model) that moves over time between multiple positions. Using the time slider, you can animate position and orientation of an object and show a line tracing the path. A multitrack is a collection of tracks. You can create Track and Multitrack by authoring KML documents or by importing your GPS data (from a number of GPS receivers or file formats such as GPX) into Google Earth.

Elevation Profile in Google Earth: You can see elevation profile of a line-string or track in Google Earth. It plots the elevation profile, speed, and associated extended data (for example, heart rate) in a KML file.

Added file import types: NMEA (.log and .nmea), Garmin GDB, Garmin Training Center, and Ozi Explorer files can now all be read. Garmin fitness extensions are now read from GPX. Extended data for Elevation Profile and Track is handled when available.

New Features available in Google Earth Pro 5.2
In addition to features present in Google Earth Consumer version, Google Earth Pro version has support for the following additional features.

Additional Layers in Google Earth Pro:

US Demographics: Provided by Nielsen Claritas, shows United States Census Tract Data, including income, age, ethnicity, household size, marital status and more for 2010, as well as a projection for 2015.

US Parcel Data: Provided by DataQuick, shows critical parcel and building information for commercial and residential real estate within the United States.

US DailyTraffic Counts: Provided by Market Planning Solutions Inc., shows the concentration of automobile traffic for different areas within the United States.

Creation of Efficient Regionated KML for vectors and images: You can now create hierarchical, vector data and image overlays in Google Earth Pro.

Improvements to Draw and Measure tools: Changes make it easier to measure and draw. You can also see measurements by selecting properties of an object now.

Known Issues and Workarounds
In Google Earth Pro, while using movie-making with high resolutions you could run into issues of text and view being distorted in OpenGL mode. We are fixing this issue. If you run into this issue, there are three workarounds

Use window size such that 3D view is larger than resolution of movie being recorded.

Use window size such that both vertical and horizontal size of 3D window is smaller than resolution needed.

If you are using windows platform, you can use DirectX mode.

Changes for Google Earth Plug-in 5.2

Enhanced Time support:

ability to toggle Historical imagery in Google Earth Plug-in (#235)

ability to create timestamps and timespans (#177).

ability to toggle time UI (#202)

ability to set plug-in’s clock rate. (#208, #143, #381, #419, #396)

ability to set the plug-in’s virtual time/clock (#104)

Improved accessors:

getUrl

getComputedStyle (#392)

getElementbyUrl

getElementbyId (fixed #60)

getElementbyType

getElementsByStyleUrl

Access to Balloon Content

Ability to get balloon content using getBalloonDescription, getBalloonHtml, and getBalloonHtmlUnsafe (#16) (#97).

Tours: Make flyto and tour paths smoother by fixing several cases for jitters and unexpected jumps in camera path. Improve tour creation so that the tour path has smooth interpolation. On pause, open balloons are left open instead of closing them. Support generating tours from nested folders of placemarks.

Collada Models: Enhance collada model handling to work when Multiple resources associated with same model. Improve handling of animated textures on the models.

Pro Movie Maker: Fix movie maker to work well in presence of animated water surface. Fix holes seen in high resolution movies. Fix bugs in creating large AVI movies. Fix a crash while recording movies. Fixed high resolution movie creation in cases where it would distort view.

Fix installation failure on 64 bit linux machines related to linking against wrong version of libssl.

Improved culling of objects near poles.

Fix the case where Earth kept continuously updating after a tour was finished.

Fix handling of drag and drop in left menu between folders.

Remove occasional spurious scrollbars in balloons.

Fix holes in high resolution movies and printing. Fix tears in high resolution image save and print when animated water was in view.

Fix a crash in switching to Mars from photo view.

Fix Mars atmosphere for some graphics cards so that it shows up with red color instead of blue now.

Show appropriate historical imagery tickmarks when zoomed way in.

Fix cases that let sound continue playing even after a balloon was closed or tour was paused.

In low memory situations, 3D buildings may not get displayed on Earth. Some of the workarounds include increasing cache size from options menu, restoring defaults from options menu, restarting application and clearing memory cache.

On some windows systems, sound recording may not work. In this case, you can fix it by installing Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86).

For KML content, balloon formatting may be different as compared to previous versions and an unnecessary horizontal scroll bar may show up.

Switching to sky from Mars does not change the search box to do sky search. As a workaround, you would need to switch to Earth and switch back to sky.

Sometimes, overlays drawn on ocean surface may also get drawn on the underwater terrain.

Missing images in balloons may cause balloons to flicker.

In KMZ files with network links, styles from a link do not always override styles from parent file.